Olivia Whetung: Sugarbush Shrapnel

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Olivia Whetung, "tibewh," 2017

10/0 Czech seed beads, nylon thread, canvas, aluminum push pins

Exhibition Opening Thursday, October 10, 7 – 9pm, Free admission, Cash bar

Join us for an evening of art and mingling to celebrate the launch of our Fall Exhibition Season, and be among the first to see our new shows by Ingrid Koenig, Sreshta Rit Premnath and Olivia Whetung.

Artist Talk | Olivia Whetung in Conversation with Clifford Atleo and Nicole Preissl

Tuesday, October 15, 6.30pm

Off-site at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, 520 East 1st Ave

Free

Join us for a conversation on food sovereignty, environmental sustainability and knowledge transfer with artist Olivia Whetung, Indigenous governance scholar Clifford Atleo and exploratory designer Nicole Preissl, who will lead a research/creation project on plants and place at the Burnaby Art Gallery later this fall.

The Contemporary Art Gallery will present the first solo exhibition in a major public institution of Chemong Lake based Anishinaabe artist Olivia Whetung. Whetung’s artistic practice examines, in her words, “acts of/active native presence.” A significant strand of recent research has manifested in beadwork, and explores Whetung’s deep concerns for knowledge as held and carried by land, bodies of water and language. Beading is itself an embodied act and in Whetung’s work, the sounds of words, knowledge of waterways and care of the land are carried by the beads without entirely revealing them, and what we face is a new translation—testament to the ways in which Whetung employs Anishinaabe visuality to both withhold and re-inscribe meaning.

For her solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Whetung proposes to continue such investigations to consider questions of sustainable food sources, invasive species and flooding in her own home territory, especially in light of accelerating global climate change. Sobering climate predictions in her own region suggest imagined futures of what foods will or won’t exist there in decades to come—specifically the Anishinaabe practice of maple syruping—and how this will impact Indigenous peoples’ abilities to pass cultural knowledge and stewardship of the environment through food to subsequent generations. These concerns will manifest as new, ambitious works for the artist: complex beadwork mapped on to large-scale panels of maple, birch and cherry veneer. This exhibition will thus resonate deeply with the core propositions of Whetung’s and wider Indigenous practice—the relationship of Indigenous reclamation, sovereignty and belonging to the environment—and simultaneously address many of the most crucial concerns facing the broader community in our time.